Picoreview: Jupiter Rising: I’m putting my money down now: Channing Tatum is not going to be the problem with the Gambit movie.

This is not to say there will not be innumerable problems with it, because it would take a miracle of untold proportions for it to be any good, but what Jupiter Ascending did was convince me that Tatum could actually do a damn fine job playing the Ragin’ Cajun. My current expectation is that it’s going to be the equivalent of Catwoman, in which I maintain poor Halle Berry did the absolutely best she possibly could have with a truly awful script.

Jupiter Ascending itself was a hot mess. They could have easily cut fifteen minutes of tediously extended fight and chase scenes, and the repeated imagery that the Wachowskis did so well in (particularly the first) Matrix films is…not nearly as elegantly handled in this, although it’s sure prevalent.

Kunis’s part is…possibly even worse than I thought it was going to be, which is saying quite a lot. There were places–a lot of places–where I had a flash of hope that they were going to improve it, but, well, they didn’t. She did the expected/necessary thing at the necessary/expected point, but I’d–I’d hoped she’d pull it out earlier, as the opportunities were there. OTOH, there was at least one screaming/gibbering point where I thought “I would not handle that this well,” so there is that. :)

Overall…yeah. It’s not very good. I had high hopes for it in the sense that I wanted it to be good, but not in the sense of expecting it to be, and it probably it around the level I expected it to. It’s reasonably entertaining in a popcorn movie way, and a lot of it is very pretty, which I think were two of the major goals, and Tatum’s surprising charm (surprising to me; I know other people have found him so in the past, but while I’ve thought he’s not a bad actor I never thought he was even vaguely charming or sexy) took it up an unexpected notch or two. So yeah. I might actually go see it again in 2D to see if it’s less overwhelming than IMAX 3D.